The great renaissance of animation (Beauty and the Beast, Toy Story, The Nightmare Before Christmas, Ratatouille, etc.) has come almost entirely from one now famous group of students at the California Institute of the Arts in the 1970s. As students, they owed it all to Walt Disney, but as pros, many hit a wall at Disney’s studios. Sam Kashner hears from a band of misfits who learned from the best and couldn’t give anything less.

It was a staggering number. In November 2012, the Los Angeles Times reported that directors who had been students in the California Institute of the Arts’ animation programs had generated more than $26 billion at the box office since 1985, breathing new life into the art of animation. The list of their record-breaking and award-winning films—which include The Brave Little Toaster, The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, The Nightmare Before Christmas, Toy Story, Pocahontas, Cars, A Bug’s Life, The Incredibles, Corpse Bride, Ratatouille, Coraline—is remarkable. Even more remarkable was that so many of the animators not only went to the same school but were students together, in the now storied CalArts classes of the 1970s. Their journey begins, and ends, with the Walt Disney Studios. As director and writer Brad Bird (The Incredibles, Ratatouille) observes, “People think it was the businessmen, the suits, who turned Disney Animation around. But it was the new generation of animators, mostly from CalArts. They were the ones who saved Disney.”

In late 1966, Walt Disney lay dying. One of his last acts before succumbing to lung cancer was looking over the storyboards for The Aristocats, an animated feature he would not live to see. The Walt Disney Studios, the wildly successful entertainment empire he had founded with his brother, Roy O. Disney, as the Disney Brothers Studio, in 1923, was beginning to lose its way. Its animated films had lost much of their luster, and Disney’s original supervising animators, nicknamed the “Nine Old Men,” were heading for that Palm Springs at the end of the mind, either retiring or dying.

Two years earlier, Walt had run into science-fiction writer Ray Bradbury at a department store in Beverly Hills. Over lunch the next day, Disney shared with him his plans for a school that would train young animators, “taught by Disney artists, animators, layout people . . . taught the Disney way,” as former CalArts student Tim Burton (Corpse Bride, Frankenweenie) described the school in the 1995 book Burton on Burton.

In the early years, starting in the late 30s, Disney animation had been gloriously realized by the Nine Old Men: Les Clark, Marc Davis, Ollie Johnston, Frank Thomas, Milt Kahl, Ward Kimball, Eric Larson, John Lounsbery, and Wolfgang Reitherman—all of whom had worked with Walt on Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. That 1937 classic, Disney’s first animated feature film, had been given an honorary Academy Award and was beloved by children, adults, critics, artists, and intellectuals everywhere. As Neal Gabler, Disney’s biographer, observed, “After Snow White, one could not really go back to Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck.” Snow White ushered in Disney’s golden age of animation; over the next five years there was a veritable parade of beautifully crafted animated films, all now classics: Pinocchio, Dumbo, Fantasia, and Bambi. The next two decades would bring Cinderella, Peter Pan, Lady and the Tramp, Sleeping Beauty, and 101 Dalmatians. But as the 60s waned, it became apparent, as Burton later noticed, that Disney had not gone out of its way to train new people.

“Nobody was being trained in full animation anymore except [at] Disney—it was literally the only game in town,” recalls Bird. “There was a point where I was probably one of a handful of young animators in the world . . . . But no one was really interested in that in my town. You would get a lot more attention if you were the backup quarterback for a junior-college football team. That would be way more impressive than being mentored by Disney animators.”

In a country roiled by anti-Vietnam War protests and tremendous social upheaval, animation seemed irrelevant, relegated to commercials and Saturday-morning cartoon programs for children, though animation as an art form had not been originally intended just for kids. At Disney there was even talk of shutting down the animation department altogether. Nonetheless, Walt approved the storyboards for The Aristocats.

“So they made the movie and it was a huge hit, and that’s when they said, ‘We can keep this going. We need some more people,’ ” recalls Nancy Beiman, one of the first women students at CalArts and now a writer, illustrator, and professor at Sheridan College, in Oakville, Ontario. But where were the new animators going to come from?

In the early 30s, Disney had sent several of his animators to study at the Chouinard Art Institute, in Los Angeles, because he wanted classically trained artists, and he had maintained a keen interest in the art school. After discovering that it was having financial difficulties, he pumped money into it, and sought to include it in his grand plan for a “City of the Arts,” the multi-disciplinary academy he had described to Bradbury two years before his death. After Chouinard merged with the Los Angeles Conservatory of Music, in 1961, Disney was able to realize his vision: he would build a single school devoted to the arts, incorporating Chouinard and the conservatory, and he would call it the California Institute of the Arts, nicknamed CalArts.

“I don’t want a lot of theorists,” he explained to Thornton “T.” Hee, one of Disney’s early animators and directors, who would end up teaching at CalArts. “I want to have a school that turns out people that know all the facets of filmmaking. I want them to be capable of doing anything needed to make a film—photograph it, direct it, design it, animate it, record it.”

Walt initially had big plans: he wanted Picasso and Dalí to teach at his school. That didn’t happen, but many of Disney’s early animators and directors would teach at CalArts, which opened its doors in 1970 and moved a year later to Valencia, California. Walt had traded ranch land he owned for the site of the campus close to the freeway, and as he had bequeathed, when he died, in 1966, roughly half of his fortune went to the Disney Foundation in a charitable trust. Ninety-five percent of that bequest would go to CalArts, the eventual home of his new, innovative Character Animation Program.

“You can blame it on Fantasia,” says John Musker (The Little Mermaid, Aladdin), another former CalArts student. Indeed one of the classic images from Fantasia—the conductor Leopold Stokowski reaching down to shake hands with Mickey Mouse—summed up nicely what Walt had envisioned for his school: a kind of League of Nations of the arts.

The Students

Jerry Rees (The Brave Little Toaster) was the first student accepted into the Character Animation Program, in 1975. Something of a prodigy in high school, he had already been taken under the wing of Eric Larson, one of Disney’s top animators, who had created, among other things, Peter Pan’s soaring flight over London in the 1953 Disney movie. Though still in high school, Rees was given a desk near Larson’s and was invited to show up during vacations from school, to work on animation under the master’s tutelage. “The studio used to call the house and ask when I was going on my next school vacation,” Rees remembers with a laugh. Shortly after graduating from high school, he was invited to become an assistant to Jack Hannah, the retired Disney animator who was running the Character Animation Program. It was a position that gave him access to the Disney “morgue,” the archive that held the artwork from all of Disney’s animated films.

“So I would just call up the morgue and go, ‘There’s this great scene in Pinocchio where Jiminy Cricket’s running along and he’s trying to put his jacket on while he moves, and it was just amazing and graceful,’ ” Rees recalls. “They would make super-high-resolution copies in their Xerox department, which actually was a huge machine that took up three different rooms on the studio lot.”

John Lasseter (Toy Story, A Bug’s Life), an athletic, personable guy who favored Hawaiian shirts, was the second student to be accepted. Lasseter grew up in Whittier, California, hometown of Richard Nixon. His mom was an art teacher at Bell Gardens High School. “That was back in the days when California schools were really great, and I had an amazing art teacher named Marc Bermudez,” he recalls. “I loved cartoons. I grew up drawing and watching them. And when I discovered as a freshman in high school that people actually made cartoons for a living, my art teacher started encouraging me to write to the Disney Studios, because I wanted to work for them one day.”

When he entered the Character Animation Program, Lasseter also worked as Hannah’s assistant.

Tim Burton came in a year after Rees and Lasseter. “I think I was lucky because they had just begun the program the year before,” he recalled in Burton on Burton. He commuted to CalArts from the suburban lawns of Burbank. “I’m of that unfortunate generation that grew up watching television rather than reading. I didn’t like to read. I still don’t.” Instead of submitting a book report, for example, young Burton once made a black-and-white super-8 movie called “Houdini,” filming himself jumping around in his backyard and speeding up the film. He got an A. “I liked to draw and stuff,” he told Vanity Fair from his home in London, “and I never saw myself going to a real school—I wasn’t that great of a student—so I think the first couple years they were kind of a bit more open to giving scholarships away, which is something I needed because I couldn’t afford the school. So I was quite lucky with that.”

Burton felt himself to be part of “a collection of outcasts. You know, you usually kind of feel alone in that way, like you’re the outcast in your school. And then all of a sudden you go to this school filled with outcasts! I think the rest of CalArts thought the Character Animation people were the geeks and weirdos. It was the first time you met people that you could kind of relate to, in a strange way.”

John Musker came from Chicago. He had already been to college, unlike most of the CalArts students in those early years. “Disney was the sort of holy grail that people wanted to get to, even if they weren’t totally in tune with the films that were being made [then], but still feeling that we loved the great ones, the old ones. It was like ‘Why can’t they be good again? Why can’t we be part of that?’ ” Of his fellow students, Musker remembers that Lasseter “was a social guy, and a huge procrastinator at school. He’d wait till the last minute on everything, and then work like a maniac to get things done. When there were parties at CalArts, John would go to the parties. He played water polo; he had a girlfriend. Brad [Bird] and John had the girlfriends. A lot of us were semi-monastic, too geeky.”

In fact, Lasseter had a beautiful girlfriend, Sally Newton, a cheerleader at Whittier Union High School. On one occasion, Musker accompanied them and a few other CalArts students on a trip to Disneyland. “I remember sitting around a table at lunchtime,” Musker reminisces, “when Sally said, ‘Wow, isn’t this great? Just think, someday this park is going to be filled with characters that you guys are going to create.’ And I was like, ‘Get out of here! I don’t think so.’ ”

Brad Bird grew up in Oregon watching Disney films. His parents had been enthusiastically supportive, his mom even driving two hours in the rain to a hole-in-the-wall theater in Portland, in those pre-home-recording days, so he could see a revival screening of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. But it was The Jungle Book that made everything click for him: “I realized it was someone’s job to figure out how a stuffy panther moved—it wasn’t just a panther, it was a stuffy panther! And somebody who was respected in the community actually had that job.” Milt Kahl, whose specialties at Disney included animating villains (Shere Khan the Tiger in The Jungle Book and the Sheriff of Nottingham in Robin Hood), took Bird under his wing when Bird was 14. By the time he entered CalArts, in 1975, “I was kind of coming out of animation retirement,” recalls Bird.

Michael Giaimo (art director on Pocahontas and Frozen) was raised in Los Angeles and studied art history at the University of California, Irvine, thinking he might become an art-history professor. “I never thought I could make a living actually doing art. Animation was my first passion, as a kid.” He had attended “an extremely academically oriented” Catholic prep school in Los Angeles, where there were no creative classes. Giaimo recalls being asked by the school’s principal, a priest, what his career goals were. He answered, “Well, I think I’d like to get into animation.” The priest looked at him like he was crazy. “Why would any of us think we could have a career?” Giaimo wonders today. “It was certainly not a lucrative career at all. We had heard rumblings about a renaissance in animation, but it took many, many years for that to happen.” While Giaimo was taking night classes at the Art Center in Los Angeles he found out about the new Character Animation Program. He applied right away and entered the program in its second year.

Gary Trousdale (Beauty and the Beast, The Hunchback of Notre Dame) went to CalArts in 1979, shortly after Lasseter graduated and Burton had left. He had grown up in Southern California and first heard about the program during Career Week in high school. “At that time, I really hadn’t considered animation—it was something that older men in sweater vests did,” he recalls. As a boy he’d loved Road Runner, Bugs Bunny, Rocky and Bullwinkle—toons with ’tude. “Ironically, though, not so much the Disney ones. Mickey Mouse was my least favorite of the bunch.”

Compared with his fellow students in those first few years, Henry Selick (Coraline, James and the Giant Peach) was the worldly one. He had already taken courses in animation at Syracuse University, had spent a year at Rutgers, and had briefly been to a school in London. By the time he arrived at CalArts, he was passionate about painting, drawing, photography, sculpting, and even music. “It seemed that in animation all my interests could come together,” he recalls. “I fell in love with animation, and there were no other schools [that offered this kind of program].”

For someone like Burton, who grew up in Burbank, it was no big deal to go to school in California, but for New Jersey-born Selick, California was the fabled land. “Arriving at CalArts,” he rhapsodizes, “was kind of dazzling. We were sold the dream of California, so it was pretty incredible to be there, to see a real roadrunner in the foliage. At that point, the campus was in a deserted area, up in the hills surrounded by canyons, so it was pretty impressive—spectacular, really.”

When asked what it was about the group that produced such creative geniuses, Tim Burton answers, “It was a new thing, and because there was nothing else in the country, or the world, like it. So it just attracted the attention of people who couldn’t find outlets in any other way. It drew a certain kind of person in a particular moment in time. It’s hard otherwise to make any sense of it.”

Musker showed up at CalArts and moved into a “cinder-block dorm,” where “they had modular furniture, so when you came in you had to assemble your room,” he recalls, “but you could assemble it however you wanted. So it looked like a Mondrian painting in a way … red, yellow, and blue—boxes and iron bars.”

Few of the students had cars or other modes of transportation, but Selick “couldn’t bear to live in a dorm. I had already done that, you know, since I’d done undergraduate work. But it was hard to find housing anywhere in the area. So I ended up getting a room with a former Taiwanese general and his family who had emigrated to the U.S. and ran a bowling alley in South-Central L.A. The guy was pretty nice. He had a Vespa motor scooter, one of the classic ones. And I had no money, and he let me use that, you know, for nothing. So that was kind of cool.”

Leslie Margolin and Nancy Beiman were two of the few female students in the Character Animation Program in its first years. Beiman had made her first animated film in high school. “I started at 16,” she says, “so that’s fairly late. Compare me with Brad Bird, who was corresponding with Milt Kahl at the Walt Disney Studios at the age of seven. Yep, I’m a late bloomer.” Beiman remembers that “the weird thing about CalArts was that it had no amenities to speak of—no clubs, no groups. Nowadays you have student services and all kinds of freshmen enhancements—none of that stuff existed then. The only thing out there was a liquor store at the foot of a hill, thoughtfully put within walking distance of all these weird little 18-year-olds. There was one bus [to Los Angeles] every alternate Thursday that was driven by homicidal maniacs. To a New Yorker like myself, I was used to having some kind of transportation, being able to walk places.” At CalArts, in the early years, “you could either get drunk, wasted, or work. I chose to work.”

Room A113 was where many of the Character Animation classes took place. “CalArts didn’t give us the best rooms of the house, shall we say,” recalls Beiman. “We used to joke that it was like the Haunted Mansion—it had no windows and no door. And you had buzzing fluorescent lights, and it was dead white inside. So to make it less depressing they put Xeroxes of Disney characters on the wall, but otherwise it was a pretty dreadful place.”

Yet the windowless room became a kind of inside joke, later cropping up in several animated films: In The Brave Little Toaster, it’s the apartment number where the Master lives; in Toy Story, it’s the license-plate number on Andy’s mom’s car; in Toy Story 2, there’s an announcement for LassetAir Flight A113; in Ratatouille, the lab rat, Git, wears a tag on his ear that reads “A113”; in Cars, it’s the headcode on Trev Diesel, the freight train; in Finding Nemo, it’s the model number on the camera used by the scuba-diver; it even appears in Roman numerals in Brave.

The Scene

What happens when you put a bunch of 18- and 19-year-old would-be animators and artists together on an isolated campus an hour’s drive from Los Angeles? Burton fondly remembers “naked people wearing only peanut butter—things like that.” One question he always asks people now attending CalArts is: “ ‘Are the Halloween parties still good?’ Every year I did something [for Halloween]. One year I did a bunch of makeup, and when I woke up, my face was stuck to the floor. So it was sickening, really, but it’s one of my few fond memories.”

Most of the character animators were actually pretty shy, Selick admits, “but obviously the painters, the singers, the theater majors—I mean, a lot of artists are exhibitionists. So Halloween parties were mind-boggling. They certainly rivaled the best Fellini films.” One female student showed up dressed as Jesus Christ, attached to a giant foam-rubber cross, flexible enough to allow her to bend at the elbows so she could drink and eat. “She was also topless,” Trousdale remembers, “which was really interesting.”

Burton and Giaimo would do staring contests, Musker recalls. “They would sit there—I’m not kidding—for, like, two hours, not blinking. I remember we went to a party and somebody said, ‘Where’s Tim?,’ and someone said, ‘Tim’s in the closet.’ You’d open the closet and Tim would be sitting there, hunched over. You’d shut the door, and he’d be in there for a couple of hours and didn’t move at all. It was like an art statement, a funny performance piece.”

As Selick points out, “it was an era of performance art. There were some extreme performance pieces. I think some of them bordered on torture.” One that Selick witnessed in his work-study job as an art-gallery attendant was “somebody with a collar on, naked, in the corner of the gallery, tied to a stake, freezing and miserable—that was the piece. So that was unsettling and unpleasant. And there was this one guy—he was from Texas. There was a swimming pool with clothing optional, but he showed more style by wearing a black male bikini and cowboy boots. He brought style to everything, and it was somewhat subversive, but funny.”

One roseate memory for all of the inaugural class was being able to look through the great stacks of animated drawings from the great Disney animators. They would study the drawings, then flip them to check the motion. Lasseter, for example, would spend hours studying the drawings. “I remember individual sequences so vividly they jump to mind almost as often as the images from the films: Frank Thomas’s Lady and the Tramp eating spaghetti; Ollie Johnston’s drawings of Bambi learning to walk; Milt Kahl’s Madame Medusa peeling off her fake eyelashes; Marc Davis’s flamboyant Cruella de Vil.”

Beiman stayed all four years. “We had very high dropout rates,” she recalls. “We started out with about 21 people, and I remember telling Jack Hannah I didn’t think there were 21 people in the country who wanted to do animation.” By the end of her second year at CalArts, Beiman was the only female student in the program, “and it was not exactly a barrel of laughs. The guys would have their little groups. So I mainly hung with live-action-film students and would go over to the other animation department,” the Experimental Animation Program.

‘We called it the motion-graphics department,” Giaimo remembers, referring to the Experimental Animation Program, headed by artist Jules Engel. Engel had worked at Disney on Fantasia and Bambi, but his artwork is also in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art. Some felt his camp tended to look down on the character-animation students as too commercial, too ready to sell their talents to Disney. “There was this avant-garde wing, and then there were these kids who were more interested in Star Trek than Rothko,” recalls Selick. According to Giaimo, “There was also a schism philosophically, in terms of how one led one’s life…. In the character department there was a conservative bent, generally. We loved animation. We were devoted to it. It took a lot of study, and it took total immersion.”

“It was like warring tribes,” Burton explains. “I think the only person who moved between the two was Henry Selick.”

Brad Bird was aware that the experimental side looked upon the Character Animation Program as “more corporate. I mean, some members of the film school and the art school considered us barely above greeting cards, you know? I don’t think they understood that what we were getting was a classical education applicable in more different ways than they realized. You learned how to read sound, you learned how to cut film, you learned how to calculate camera moves on a camera stand, you learned about life drawing, and you learned about light and shadow and how you can orchestrate color.”

Selick, unlike many of the people in the Character Animation Program, “liked the darker things, bits from Fantasia, and the more experimental things. I’d been exposed to a much bigger world of art and music already, and a lot of the folks in Character Animation were very insulated. I mean, it’s kind of like they were studying from Disney to do Disney.”

Few of the Character Animation people took courses with Engel. “In fact,” recalls Selick, “they didn’t understand him. They ridiculed him. He had a heavy accent, and they were young, and he wasn’t part of their program. But those guys from Character, they should have gotten out a little more. They should have gone to more gallery openings and, you know, not just dismissed it all.”

The Teachers

If you ask the first contingent of students at CalArts what made the program so valuable, they would all agree on one thing: the teachers. Lasseter recalls, “In my third year, Bob McCrea, a Disney animator who had retired, came and started teaching us animation. We had two days of figure drawing. Then we had Ken O’Connor, who was the legendary layout artist—backgrounds and the staging—for Disney Studios. He’s Australian and very, very funny, with a very dry sense of humor. And he was amazing. He came in the first day and he said, ‘I never taught a class in my life, and I don’t know how to teach. I’m just going to tell you what you need to know.’ ”

“Marc Davis was one of the Nine Old Men of animation,” recalls Giaimo. “He was a Renaissance man at Disney. He helped design concepts for the theme parks. He animated, oh, my God, Cinderella, Tinker Bell, Cruella de Vil, Maleficent in Sleeping Beauty. He was an amazing animator, an amazing draftsman, brilliant designer.”

Alexander “Sandy” Mackendrick, the Scottish director who some 20 years earlier had come from England’s Ealing Studios to direct the great New York noir movie Sweet Smell of Success, was the dean of the CalArts film school. But in 1967 his directing career had hit bottom with Don’t Make Waves, starring Tony Curtis and Sharon Tate. Not long after, he was asked to set up and direct the film program at CalArts. “He came into our program, and we had this idea that he’s looking down on us, the animators,” Bird recalls, “but he brought in storyboards that he’d done in the 1940s, and we were flabbergasted because they were unbelievably well drawn. And so he had drawing cred with us right away. Which was silly, because he was a brilliant director, but we didn’t know it. At that point, I hadn’t seen Sweet Smell of Success.”

The curiously named T. Hee was another popular teacher. Among other things, he practiced Tai Chi, and though he was once morbidly obese he had become practically gaunt. “This guy was amazing,” Lasseter enthuses. “T. Hee directed the ‘Dance of the Hours’ sequence in Fantasia. He taught us caricature and character design and other stuff, but his class was more than that. He just wanted you to think creatively.” Nearly four decades later, Trousdale still remembers one of T. Hee’s provocative assignments: taping sketch paper under a table and drawing “blind and upside down.” T. Hee also herded his students into a theater for a day to watch animated commercials. “That was eye-opening,” says Trousdale. “Those commercials were telling a story, with a beginning, middle, and end, in 30 seconds. It was a discipline—you had to be clear and concise.”

Selick recalls Elmer Plummer as “a Disney guy who taught life drawing. And it was kind of funny. I mean, there’s all these students—99 percent guys, and all kids who’d never seen a nude woman in their lives. So, most of the models were females, and Elmer was pretty good at getting [the students] through the shock of it.” One of the bohemian girls from the art school volunteered to be a life model, and to torture the kind of nerdy, Star Trek-loving boy artists, she posed nude wearing a Mouseketeer hat.

But the teacher who made the biggest impact on that first cadre of CalArts students was Bill Moore, a design teacher who had come out of the Chouinard Art Institute. “Bill Moore,” says Selick, “was exceptional—a wake-up call, especially for some of the kids right out of high school. He was clearly gay, and this was a time when people from Iowa would say, ‘What the hell? What’s with that guy?’ And he was flamboyant.”

According to Giaimo, Moore had to be brought in kicking and screaming to teach at CalArts: “Why would I want to teach a bunch of kids whose only interest is in making Mickey’s tail wag? They don’t want to learn about design.” But after his first two years there, he saw how his students were incorporating his ideas into their work. Bird recalls what a revelation it was to learn from Moore that “design was all around you, and it was either good design or bad design. But it was everywhere, and in everything: manhole covers, lamps, furniture, cars, ads in the paper—everything had elements of design in it. And it absolutely changed my eye, and it was all due to Bill Moore.”

The first thing he told his students, says Giaimo, was “I’m not going to teach you color. I’m not going to teach you design. I’m not going to teach you how to draw. What I’m going to do is I’m going to teach you how to think.” Giaimo recalls that his assignments were like Rubik’s Cube brainteasers. “He took you to the edge of anxiety, fear, and frustration, and then you learned. He had an amazing style. He was politically incorrect with his approach, with his language.” Giaimo remembers him telling one overweight student who wasn’t getting it, “Your brain is as fat as your body.” Bird recalls how “he would just swear at people, and everyone was absolutely terrified of him in the first couple of classes, and then everybody ended up loving him—I mean, loving him like take a bullet for him.”

Lasseter considers Moore one of the biggest influences on his life, though he “was legendary for being extremely difficult. Very, very critical and very hard.” Mike Giaimo says that when Moore was at Chouinard in the 1950s, when he saw work he didn’t approve of during an art show, he “would hold his cigarette up to the piece, threatening to set it on fire.” Thus began the legend that Bill Moore set fire to student work. “But I did see him tear pieces off the wall and stomp on them,” adds Giaimo.

Trousdale remembers, “Usually there was only one piece that stood out [to Moore]—you were the genius of the day. And Lasseter was the genius of the day for like three weeks running. He was getting pretty proud of himself—his head’s getting a little big.” So when Moore walked by the fourth week and looked at Lasseter’s work, “he goes, ‘That’s true shit,’ and just walks by.” Lasseter was crestfallen. Moore “saw the effect it had on him,” Trousdale remembers. “He goes, ‘John, you can’t wake up with a hard-on every morning.’ ”

Perhaps A113 isn’t the only homage that appears in films by CalArts alumni. Could Bill Moore have been the model for the demanding and acerbic food critic Anton Ego in Brad Bird’s film Ratatouille? And might there be just a hint of Jules Engel in Mr. Rzykruski in Tim Burton’s 2012 remake of Frankenweenie? (Brad Bird comments that Ego isn’t based on Moore, “although there are some similarities—the fear they inspire, their genuine love for art—but there is an animated character who actually was based on Bill Moore before Chouinard became CalArts: the tiny alien, the Great Gazoo, on The Flintstones. No kidding.”)

Disney Day

Everything led up to the day Disney executives would come to Valencia at the end of the school year to view student films and determine who would be hired. “That was such a nerve-racking, nail-biting time,” Giaimo recalls. “In those days, we didn’t have video—everything was shot on film. You waited days, weeks, to see your scenes. And when you got down to the wire, you kind of didn’t know what you had. With all the Disney brass coming, you wanted to put your best foot forward. You not only showed your film, you showed all your design work.”

“The review board came out … and it felt slightly like you were in a Miss America contest,” Burton recalls. The competition, and the student films, got more elaborate each year. He was surprised when his entry, Stalk of the Celery Monster, was chosen. To this day Burton believes he was picked because it was a lean year, and he just got lucky.

One year, after the last name was called, the sound of muffled weeping was heard. No one dared turn around to see which of their classmates hadn’t made the cut. Pressure to catch the eye of Disney producers was intense because, as Giaimo and his classmates knew, “if you didn’t make it at Disney, you were stuck in Saturday-morning TV or a commercial house. If you missed out on the Disney boat, then there was really no way you could ply your craft. There were no other options for storytelling, for narrative animation.”

The irony is that while Disney welcomed some of its new recruits to its studios in Burbank—Selick, Lasseter, Burton, Rees, Musker, Giaimo, and Bird—it had no idea what to do with them. In fact, the studio brass seemed to be afraid of them. The first film they were put to work on, 1981’s The Fox and the Hound, showed the stark differences between the old animators and the new kids on the block. “I think once people got to Disney, it was kind of like a cold wake-up call, that maybe it wasn’t everything it was cracked up to be,” says Burton. “It was like being groomed to be eaten by cannibals. The company wanted to stretch out and try different things and hire new people, but they were still kind of stuck in the past.”

They called it “the rat’s nest,” the room where the new animators were put to work. “It was like too much nuclear energy packed into the tiny little capsule of the Disney Animation Studio,” describes Glen Keane (supervising animator on Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin), a greatly admired Disney animator who had studied at CalArts. “It just could not contain that kind of passion. It was this hotbed of discontent because they wanted so much more—eventually it exploded.”

In fact, Burton was doing remarkable work there, sealed off in a tiny room in the animation building. Remembers Brad Bird, who moved to Disney after two years at CalArts, “He did these amazing designs for Black Cauldron that were better than anything they had in the movie—he did these griffins that actually had claws for mouths, and they were really great and really scary, in the best way. But because they were unconventional, [the studio] ended up doing some half-assed dragon in the movie.”

Trousdale, who made it to the studio a few years later, agrees that Disney “didn’t know what the hell to do with Tim. They were scared of him. So they just stuck him into an office. That’s when he came up with the original ‘Frankenweenie,’ ” a film short in which a boy reanimates his dead dog.

Selick and Burton worked together on The Fox and the Hound under Glen Keane, and Burton found it sheer torture when Keane assigned him to draw “all the cute fox scenes … and I couldn’t draw all those four-legged Disney foxes … I couldn’t even fake the Disney style. Mine looked like roadkills,” he recalled in Burton on Burton. “Imagine drawing a cute fox with Sandy Duncan’s voice for three years…. I couldn’t do it—which was probably a good thing.”

John Musker had a similar problem. Asked to prepare a portfolio, he went to the Lincoln Park Zoo in the midst of a Chicago winter, where he attempted to draw the shivering monkeys. Defeated by the freezing temperature, he ended up at the Field Museum, working from its dioramas of taxidermied animals. “They rejected me,” Musker explains, “in part because they characterized my animal drawings as ‘too stiff.’ What can I say? I drew them the way I saw them.”

Selick also got into trouble working on The Fox and the Hound. “It’s hard to do four-legged animals that are pretty realistic,” he admits. “I just decided that I was going to do the feet and I left the head off. I animated the whole scene with a headless option,” he recalls with a laugh. “But Glen Keane was deeply upset. He said, ‘Please, animate with the head on from now on!’ ”

The new recruits were on fire and full of ideas, and management was wary. Bird felt that “you were kind of coached to take anything distinctive out of a scene. Jerry Rees did this wonderful walk that was a little bit stiff but full of life and very distinctive,” for the hunter in The Fox and the Hound. “They made him re-do that walk probably 8 to 10 times, and every time they told him to tone it down, tone it down, tone it down. He didn’t want to give them what they wanted, because what they wanted was not good.”

Bird feels that the best scene in The Fox and the Hound is the bear fight, mostly because “they ran out of time to screw it up. So all the young people who were still there—I was fired by that point for ‘rocking the boat’—got together and basically jammed on that sequence. John Musker took the hunter; Glen Keane did the bear. Suddenly, this film that’s just mildly pleasant—no real ups, no real downs, it kind of lithiums its way along—suddenly comes out of its mild coma and snaps to life. The camera angles get dramatic and the animation gets bigger and the drawings get really good and the light glints off the bear’s fur. The only reason it exists is that they didn’t have time to ruin it.”

When the film was finally completed, Bird noticed that one of the cameras was out of focus. “We were so mad at that point, we didn’t tell anybody. We just thought, Let’s see how long it takes them to notice. And guess what? It’s still out of focus. Probably a third of the movie is out of focus!”

Burton recalls, “All these people—Musker and Lasseter and Brad Bird and Jerry Rees—they were so ready and willing and able to just go, but it took years. The Little Mermaid, which was probably the first movie that really used people like Musker—that could have happened roughly 10 years earlier if the powers that be had been up for it! The Little Mermaid? It took forever to make that film.”

Musker remembers “Crusading City Editor Day,” where “we had loosened ties and wore white shirts and talked like we were in a Howard Hawks movie. ‘We got to get this thing out by tomorrow!’ Tim adopted the persona of a washed-up, dissolute writer struggling at a newspaper. So we’re all sitting at this long table—secretaries, executives—and they’re looking at all these kids who are talking like hard-bitten newspapermen. Tim sort of staggered into the table, saying, ‘Please, I need a job. I just need a job!’ And he had pre-chewed all this food, and he threw it up on the table and staggered out of the dining room. There were screams and moans, but we just started howling with laughter.”

After being under-utilized and under-appreciated, Burton recalls, “Lasseter left, Bird left … a lot of people left the building because they were so frustrated.” Lasseter was in fact fired after he tried to persuade Disney Studios to use the innovation of computer graphics on its next animated feature, The Brave Little Toaster. “They basically heard his pitch and said, ‘O.K., that’s it. You’re out of here,’ ” says Bird. “He was just kind of dumbfounded because, like me, he had been prepped by the Old Masters, and suddenly no one was interested in all the stuff we were inspired to do. It was a very weird, very specific time. As disney’s top-tier guys retired, the people running things became the businesspeople and the middle-level animation artists who had been there awhile. They just wanted to sit back and coast on the disney reputation while we younger guys were on fire, full of the ideas that the old-master disney guys inspired in us. Now we were the ones thinking outside the box.”

What Burton found maddening about being at disney was that “they wanted artists but turned them into zombies on an assembly line.” He sometimes found solace hiding in a little coat closet in the office next to Keane’s: “So I opened the door and Tim would be in the closet looking at me,” Keane remembers. “And so I’d just take my coat off and put it on his head and shut the door and go in and work. At noon I’d come out and open the closet door and just take the coat off of Tim’s head—it was still there!” Burton was fired after he made his live-action short “Frankenweenie,” in 1984, because disney considered it too scary for children. Keane remained at disney, retiring in 2012 after 38 years.

All these years later, they continue to pay homage to that nondescript, window-less room with the buzzing lights at CalArts—room A113. At some point people started asking Beiman, “‘Why is this number, a113, turning up in Pixar movies and Disney? What is this stupid number?’ Well, that was our classroom.”

“It was the very meaning of poetic justice,” says Giaimo, when in 2006 Disney purchased Pixar and John Lasseter was named the chief creative officer of both. Certainly the poignancy of that event was not lost on men like Giaimo, Bird, Musker, and others who are enjoying prosperous careers. One of last year’s most successful films was the animated Disney feature Frozen, which re-united Lasseter with Giaimo and another CalArts alumnus, chris Buck. Frozen has grossed nearly $800 million worldwide since opening and recently received two Oscar nominations.

How did so many great talents come together in one place? “It’s not so romantic to say, but I think some of it was timing,” Musker explains. “Because young people had been excluded from disney for such a long time—then, just as the doors were opening, there was sort of a vacuum. I do think we still were part of the legacy; we’d all seen Disney films in theaters as kids, and that was kind of primal. After all, we were taught by Disney’s guys, so there’s that link, a lineage. And so I give it to Sally [Newton]”—the girl who had predicted the eventual success of the CalArts animators on the outing to Disneyland so many years before. “She was exactly right.”